Archive for January, 2010

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=845135&highlight=reasons+Renders+suck
Here is an amazingly blunt, but also very good article off of CGTalk that sums up a lot of good points that any beginner/intermediate/expert 3D artist should think about with any of there projects/work. Though [...]

Remember the good ol’ days when you could apply TurboSmooth to everything in your scene and than turn the viewport iterations to zero and let Mental Ray sort out all of that wacky smoothing stuff?
Then one day you opened up Maya and everything changed. You applied a Subdiv Proxy, but had all of [...]

So, Disney Animation Studios released the API for pTex as open-source yesterday. I have watched the demo on YouTube and I can honestly say I am wicked excited. I am not usually the one to jump on the bandwagon early on, as Pixar is the only one to implement it into Renderman, as of yet… I am merely [...]

I had to do it, it was bugging me terribly. I took the setAttr on Multiple Objects expression below and turned it into a full on procedure. Save this little mel script into the scripts folder.
multiAttr.mel
Open up your script editor and type…
source multiAttr;
multiAttr;
Highlight that code in [...]

node.attribute = noise((frame / A) + B) * C;
A = Frame divided by a number will smooth the noise out over that many numbers of frames.
B = If you think about a regular 2D noise texture, this noise expression samples upwards in the Y direction. So if you add the same expression to another piece [...]

I learned most of this from Digital Tutors, but other than there I couldn’t find any other tutorials for it. So I’ve decided to make up a quick tutorial here for all you devoted readers.
NOTE: I am doing this in Maya 2009 Unlimited
Firstly, create a simple little scene.
It requires 1 Light (I [...]

This little expression allows you to change an attribute on multiple objects without having to go into the Channel Controller and enabling the attribute to be keyable in the Channel Box. The expression is actually quite simple…
It first creates an array of all the objects you currently have [...]

That’s right, I have finally decided to start blogging. I am now officially about 8 or 9 years behind the rest of the world. I am basically going to use this to post stuff I have worked on or am currently working on. I will also post some amazing links that I stumble upon. But, for the most part I [...]